The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
The Gospel lesson began this morning: “And it came about that while He, Jesus, was praying in a certain place, after He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John also taught his disciples.'” That was a common practice of the day. It was a common practice that each and every rabbi had a particular kind of prayer and address to teach the students as their way to approach the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim.
See, praying properly — not just praying, but praying properly — is a vital part of the Christian life. Learning the proper content, and even the kind of form, of a God-pleasing prayer is part of a good Christian education, and it’s part of a good theological education for a seminary student headed to the ministry. And although you don’t quite realize it, your whole life in the church, and in a congregation that is shaped and governed by the Word of God, teaches you actually how to pray. That’s one of the functions of the liturgy and the prayers of the church. If you listen and study what it is that you’re praying, you’ll see what a God-pleasing prayer looks like, what it sounds like, how it’s constructed, and what it prays for.
See, a God-pleasing prayer is a prayer that always adheres to the Word of God. It prays for the will of God to be done, and it prays in service to the church, one’s family, one’s neighbor, and even one’s own self.
John the Baptist, who followed the custom of the day, taught his disciples how and what to pray. And one of Jesus’s disciples — we don’t know which one — took note of this fundamental fact, but he also took notice that Jesus had not yet taught them how to pray. So he asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. And so Jesus said to them: “When you pray, say, ‘Father, hallowed be Thy name.'”
Now by the way, that sounds a little different than what we say each and every week in the liturgy of the church. It sounds a little different than what we’re used to saying and what we’re used to hearing, because our liturgy tends to follow the prayer as given in the Gospel of St. Matthew. There are some differences between the two, but not particularly significant differences. They pray for the same things, but Luke skips over some phrases and the introduction itself and goes straight to the very first petition: “Hallowed be Thy name.” Matthew included the introduction to the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew chapter 6, verse 9: “Pray then in this way,” Jesus said, “Our Father who art in heaven.” But in both Matthew and Luke, the prayer keeps first things first.
The very first thing that Jesus teaches us in how to pray is to whom we are to pray — that is, that we are to address the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim of the Old Testament, as our Father, our heavenly Father. It would be hard to overstate just how unique this address was when Jesus first spoke the prayer. He’s likely the only rabbi to have invoked the name Father, the title Father, in regard to us. In the Old Testament — the Bible that Jesus and the disciples knew — God is called Father only 13 to 15 times. It depends on a couple of translations for a couple of verses, but nonetheless, no more than 15 times is God referred to in the Old Testament as Father. Overwhelmingly, He is Yahweh Elohim — Lord, Yahweh, God, Elohim.
God is Father, though, in the New Testament an awful lot. In the Gospels, Jesus refers to His Father in heaven 150 times. He speaks of God as our Father in the Gospels 30 times. Paul describes God as our Father, encourages us to pray and cry out to our Father, over 40 times in his epistles. Thus for the Christian today — the Christians that are centered in the language and theology of the New Testament, not the Christians that go around parroting the stupidity that is in the world — God is Father, because that’s what the New Testament has taught us to pray and how to speak. It’s how we address our prayers to God. It’s how we address it in the liturgy and in our catechism and the life. We pray, time and time again, to God our Father.
So the very first thing Jesus teaches us in regard to prayer is to petition God by His name, by His relationship to us — Father — and by what He does: fatherly things. 150 times Jesus addresses God as His Father. He’s able to do so because Jesus is the Son of God from eternity, begotten before the foundation of all the worlds. In Christ, God reveals Himself to us as Father. He is Father to Jesus, Jesus Son to the Father, and He becomes Father to us. As Lewis wrote: “The Son of God became man to enable men to become sons of God.” That’s in regard to Christ: an eternal relationship of the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father. In regard to us, calling upon God as our Father is only possible — was made only possible — because God the Father bestows the status of sonship on those He adopted through the water and the Word of Holy Baptism. To those who believe on His name, He gives the power to become the children of God.
See, sonship — I know it’s offensive in these days, greatly offensive, as offensive as calling God Father — sonship in the New Testament is a legal status. In the ancient world, a son, or sons, inherit. But in the thought-language of the Bible, sons consist of all the people of Israel — that is, of each individual member of the church. Romans 9:4: “Theirs is the people of Israel” — the exact quote: “the adoption to sonship, theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the Law” — even this interesting bit — “the temple worship and the promises.” Those are what the sons, male and female, of the church and of God the Father have as their inheritance: glory, the covenants, the Law, the Gospel, the worship of the temple, the promises. Romans 8:14 makes sure female believers know that they too are children of the heavenly Father, and thus heirs: “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.”
So Jesus began the prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven.” Small Catechism: “With these words God tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father and we are His true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask Him as dear children ask their dear father.”
Jesus gives us a prayer verbatim, and not only teaches us how to address God — namely, as our dear Father, our Father in heaven — but also He gives us the proper content of a Christian prayer. In Luke’s version, the first petition appears in this form: “Father, hallowed be Thy name.” Again the Small Catechism: “God’s name is indeed holy in itself, but we pray in this petition that it be kept holy among us. How is this done? When the Word of God is taught in truth and purity, and we as children of God lead holy lives in accordance with it. To this end, help us, dear Father in heaven. But he that teaches and lives otherwise than God’s Word teaches profanes the name of God among us.”
See, teaching, preaching, living — even praying — in a way that is contrary to the will and the way of God profanes the name of God. When we don’t pray according to the Word and the will of God, we’re praying wrongly. People think there isn’t such a thing, but there is. Even the most pious Christians, however, do not hallow God’s name as they ought. And I am the least among the pious. I certainly do not hallow God’s name as I should. No one does. No one ever has — except Jesus the Christ. He hallowed God’s name for us. He taught the Word of God in its truth and its purity, rightly dividing and defining the Law and the Gospel given to Him by His heavenly Father. He, and He alone, lived the holy — that is, the perfect — life in accordance with the Word and the will of the Father. He even prayed for that very thing in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if it’s possible, let this cup pass from Me. But not as I will, but as You will.”
Jesus lived in perfect obedience to God His Father. Then Jesus gave us — through Him — His holiness and His name in Baptism, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So when we pray the first petition, what we’re praying is that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be kept holy among us. That is: we’re praying for something we’ve already been given. We’re praying that the status quo continue — that the righteousness of Christ continues to be our righteousness, His perfect life continues to be imputed to us as if it were our perfect life.
Then the next three petitions — this is where it gets really kind of theological, I suppose. The next three petitions deal with the following topics: kingdom, bread, and forgiveness. But here again, there’s more than meets the eye. In the Gospel of Luke, these three petitions are butted up right next to each other, because they’re connected to each other by a theme. If I weren’t preaching on the Lord’s Prayer and I said “kingdom, bread, and forgiveness,” you would tend to link those together. But when we say it in the Lord’s Prayer, we seem to disassemble them instinctively, and perhaps err.
In the Gospel of Luke, these go together. They’re connected. “Thy kingdom come.” Small Catechism: “The kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer, of itself, but we pray in this petition that it come unto us also. How is this done? When our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His holy Word and lead a God-pleasing life here in time and there in eternity.”
Again, Jesus has already delivered the kingdom to us. We belong to the kingdom of heaven, called the church. He sent His holy Word and His Holy Spirit into us to create the gift of faith, and in the means of grace, Holy Baptism. For where Christ is, there is His Word, and where His Word is, there is His Holy Spirit, and where the Word, the Holy Spirit, and Christ are, there is by necessity the kingdom of God. Thus we pray that we do not lose or neglect His Word or His sacraments or the church’s ministry — which is the temptation that each and every one of us face almost every single Sunday morning, as we debate in our minds if we’re going to go or not to church. And to that temptation, many of our former members and lots of other people who call themselves Lutheran have fallen prey and have left the church altogether for life in the world.
Next: “Give us this day our daily bread.” God gives daily bread, even without our prayer, even to wicked men. But we pray in this petition that He would lead us to know it and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving. And what is meant by daily bread? “Everything that belongs to the support and wants of the body, such as meat, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, field, cattle, money, goods, a pious spouse, pious children, pious servants, faithful magistrates, good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honor, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.” It’s a long list Luther compiles there.
The petition for daily bread in the Lord’s Prayer is the first of, by the way, three petitions that focus on us — on the petitioner, on the Christian. The others focus on the kingdom of heaven and on honoring God. The earthly and the physical needs are obviously included in the petition for our daily bread — bread — and those are the blessings that Jesus focuses on in the Small Catechism. But Luther’s list does not exhaust everything that is included in daily bread, because in fact daily bread has a spiritual — I’m going to use a fancy word — and an eschatological meaning to it. Eschatological: in the life of the world to come, at the heavenly banquet, we will be partaking of the finest wine, meats, and bread. So think of daily bread as everything we need to maintain our body and life in this world, and everything we need to maintain our true Christian faith, which is created and sustained through the Word and Sacrament ministry.
So daily bread both is temporal — here in time — and eternal — there in eternity. It is physical, in that we feed our bodies, clothe our bodies, take care of ourselves and our families in this world, and spiritual, in that we attain true Christian faith and receive the next petition: the forgiveness of sins.
“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Small Catechism: “We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look upon our sins, nor deny our petition on account of them. For we are worthy of none of the things for which we pray, neither have we deserved them, but that He would grant them all to us by grace. For we daily sin much and indeed deserve nothing but punishment. So we, on our part, also heartily forgive and also readily do good to those who sin against us.”
There they are: the introduction — “Our Father.” We’re taught to pray to our Father. And then the three petitions: the kingdom of God come to us — and how? In the Word and Sacrament ministry of the church and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The bread — both our daily needs in this temporal, physical world and our spiritual needs, eating and feasting on the bread of life. All to what end? To the forgiveness of sins.
These petitions were not just randomly included and randomly put in order. They are not unrelated. In the Gospel of Luke, the kingdom, bread, and forgiveness are the three key elements in what’s called table fellowship in the Gospel of St. Luke. It’s a theme. Luke is about Jesus’s ministry to sinners, to the outcast. That’s to whom he’s writing. He writes a Gospel to make sure that the people who read it know that they are a sinner and a social outcast among the population — Christ came to save them too.
When Jesus takes His meals with sinners, that act signals that the kingdom of God has arrived in the coming of Jesus Christ. He sent out the 70 ahead of Him to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is nearby. He’s coming to their town, and if they are received, they go in and they eat the meal. Same for Christ when He comes to town. So the kingdom of God has arrived in the coming of Jesus. Luke, by the way, 5:27-39, is the calling of St. Matthew the tax collector — to where? To dinner with Jesus. Why? To be forgiven, and called into the ministry.
In earthly food, Jesus extends forgiveness of sins to sinners who dined with Him. That’s the story of the woman who comes into Jesus as He sits down in a Pharisee’s house to eat, and she anoints Jesus’s feet with oil at the dinner table, and Jesus forgives her sins. Then the miraculous multiplication of physical bread — it’s a sign in the Bible, Old and New Testament, of the abundance of the Messianic age that’s coming, which has already begun in Jesus Christ. That’s the feeding of the 5,000 in Luke 9:10-17, and in the prophet Amos 9:13, which says: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when the plowman will overtake the reaper” — that is, more will be harvested than is planted.
To be in table fellowship with Jesus is to be in and partake of the kingdom of heaven, the bread of life, and the forgiveness of sins — all of which lead to their climax in the Lord’s Supper on the night in which He was betrayed. In the Lord’s Supper, Jesus instituted the meal of the New Testament in His blood, shed for the forgiveness of sins. He takes physical bread and He says: “This is My body, which is being given on behalf of you.” During the meal, twice Jesus says that He won’t partake of this meal again until the kingdom of God comes in its fullness, eschatologically — the end time, the beginning of the new heaven and the new earth.
In the Lord’s Supper, God gives bread that is truly physical, and at the same time links it to a promise in the life of the world to come. Bread is a foretaste of the feast to come. Revelation 19:6-9: it is bread that brings forgiveness of sins, because it is and hosts the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
By the way, have you ever noticed where the historical and biblical church puts the Lord’s Prayer in the Divine Service? In most of our prayer liturgies — not all of them, but in this one that we use each Sunday morning, because we have the Lord’s Supper — do you know where it occurs? It occurs after the preface for Holy Communion and immediately before the Words of Institution. That’s where the church put it. Because we’re praying for the kingdom of God, we’re praying for the daily bread, spiritual and physical, we’re praying for the remission of sins — and God responds by coming to us in the Lord’s Supper, in the Sacrament of the Altar.
For this purpose, the next petition: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.” Small Catechism: “We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look upon our sins, nor deny our petitions on account of them. For we are worthy of none of the things for which we have prayed, neither have we deserved them, but that He would grant them all to us by grace.”
See, you are fully and completely forgiven. You are fully and completely adopted. You belong and are a resident citizen of the heavenly kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. And in Christ, He finished it all. He said so: paid in full, on the cross. It is finished. The sins of the world have been atoned for. The petition for forgiveness is simply a petition that we continue in our state of being forgiven. It’s not like we fall in and out of it, in and out of it, in and out of it — that you’re out of it until you come and confess your sins, and then you’re back into it when you fall into sin, and then you’re back out of it. We call this the state of grace. The state of grace is: you have the forgiveness of sins. Eventually you can’t lose it. People can lose their faith. They can stop thinking of sin as sin, adopt it as a lifestyle in full rebellion to the Word of God. But this petition acknowledges that we as Christians — adopted sons and daughters, heirs to the heavenly kingdom — have the forgiveness of sins, even here, before you ask. Your heavenly Father, He’s already answered and given you what you need.
He’s given you victory over sin and death and the power of the devil. He has given you a church filled with fellow sinners and fellow saints who struggle daily as you do to live by true Christian faith. Second, He’s given you a church where His written Word is read, His preached Word is listened to, spiritual songs drawn from the pages of the Bible themselves are sung — just as you sang a song based on the Lord’s Prayer before this sermon. He’s given you a place to come and to partake of table fellowship — of fellowship with Him and fellow believers at the communion rail.
The Father, the kingdom, the bread, the forgiveness. The world doesn’t have these, but you do. And your sins are forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.